There was a fella called Piaget who many years ago ran a famous experiment Piaget’s mountains. He was looking at child psychology and trying to understand at what age kids learned to decentralize – i.e. look at things from another persons perspective. He had three mountains in a row and on had a house on, one had a cross on, and by putting a doll on top of different mountains he would question the child to what the doll could see (e.g. could the child see the cross if the house was in the way? The idea was the child had to imagine the dolls perspective in order to give the correct answer. His conclusion was that 4 year old kids cannot decentralize, and he was later proven wrong by another guy browning who reasoned that if the kids were more familiar with the objects in the experiment they could (most kids can’t imagine being on top of a mountain because they’ve never tried it. Browning used a cop and a robber in a house to achieve more successful results.
Theres a point here. That point being that over the years a lot of work has been done into understanding the ability to see things from anothers perspective, and we can do it by the age of 4. Frankly though, sometimes i find it hard to believe sometimes, when i see people in the world around me. A simple example – many times i have had documentation submitted to me for approval which at its first draft i have had to write all over because whoever wrote it didn’t think about the intended audience. If your writing a document for a systems administrator to restore a system from backup, you need to tell that administrator where to find the backups, how to gain access to the backups, and a whole host of other things, that of course you may know, but is directly relevant should someone ever need to perform that job. You need to put yourself in that situation.
The blogs i posted before mentioned cutting people slack because a lot is going on… i shouldn’t really need to do that either, because people should stop and think about it. As its something thats proven to be an innate ability from a young age why is it, as adults, we chose do ignore it? Where does this lack of consideration stem from?
I dont profess perfection in this either – one of my oldest friends stuart says i have the most contact information but can be the worse person to get hold of. I have a really busy life, and because of that i have to prioritize just to keep myself sane, but in my defense if i have to write a document, or interact with a person i do try to see things from their perspective, because it helps me understand them.
So theres the challenge. next time you speak to someone, or do something, try to see it from anothers perspective.
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